This question was closed, without answers, and no activity for at least a week, thus it was automatically deleted. Then, it came up on our Meta, and I decided to undelete it, to give more people the chance to evaluate the closure.

However, Community ♦ didn't really like that, and after a few hours it deleted it again. I guess the script didn't count me undeleting as "activity", and since the question fulfilled the auto-deletion criteria, it just killed it again.

That's... not right. Auto-deleted questions can only be undeleted by moderators, and we rarely do something without good reason. The script should either completely ignore questions that have been undeleted, or at the very least recognize the undeletion as significant activity and restart the autodeletion counter.

If the question is worth keeping around, it's worth reopening. I'm not sure why that didn't happen in this case. Judging by the comments, I suspect Double AA was expecting or waiting on some additional community discussion that just didn't happen.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but at the same time I don't think 17 hours are enough to generate (and conclude) community discussion (on the medium/low traffic sites of the network). A week (i.e resetting the counter) would make a bit more sense, imho.

I assume you didn't want to reopen it unilaterally because you want it to be a small-c community decision, but a) how many more people do you think are going to look at it and care in the next week that didn't in the first, and b) the same people whose reopen review you want are also capable of close review. Again, I think resetting the timer makes sense, but I also think it would be reasonable for you to reopen and leave a comment explaining your intentions.
– Josh CaswellNov 18 '13 at 20:55

4

@JoshCaswell - keep in mind this was on Programmers and we don't have as many 10k+ users there as compared to SO. We also don't have the interaction / volume that SO does by any means. To get community review, the question really needs to stay undeleted for a bit longer.
– GlenH7Nov 18 '13 at 21:03

@GlenH7: The feature request will affect all sites, so we have to take into account its effect everywhere.
– Josh CaswellNov 18 '13 at 21:05

@JoshCaswell - that's a valid point. I didn't see it that way at first, but I understand what you're saying. That does generate a bit of an issue given the volume that SO sustains versus the much lower volume on the other sites. Smaller sites need that additional time for a reasonable review, but that's the equivalent of a few lifespans on SO.
– GlenH7Nov 18 '13 at 21:08

It need not just be a mod's undeletion that counts as activity. Consider the case where a question gets 3x delete votes followed by 3x undelete votes the day before the script runs. It shouldn't be deleted the next day. Why that would happen? Dunno... but I've seen some amusing activity histories.
– user213963Nov 18 '13 at 21:28